Who am I?

I had a wonderful conversation with a friend a few months back, and she has given me permission to share it with you.

In the non-dual land, there is a beautiful pointer… “Who am I?” We have such a deep and habitual pattern to identify with the forms of our life, and in the search for truth, this is a primary trap that needs to be seen through. The forms look like “I am this person, with this body, with this family, with this history.” This pointer shows you there is more here than all this. It helps direct you to something more fundamentally true, shaking up this strong habit to define and intensify yourself solely by the forms of your life.

And still, this is only part of the story… it’s the sixth and seventh ox herding pictures from Zen. Or the stages of “Riding the Bull, and the Bull Transcended”, from the ancient Japanese Zen poem Ten Bulls. And this is an essential part of the journey, when you come to recognize that the forms of your life: your body, your story, your family, are not fundamentally, or entirely, or truly, who you are….

But the rest of it, i.e) Then what is the form? What is my body, my history, who is my family? What is that? Because we know it too is included.

The form is “the illusion.” It is simply energy taking on specific shapes, moment to moment. And yet, that energy is actually you, but not the “you” that was previously understood to be you. So it is still true that the deeper, truer “you” is also these forms. You can see it more fully, in the same way that you dream at night…

At night you are the one dreaming all kinds of stories when you go to sleep. In the dream, it’s not completely true that you are solely the car, or solely the man texting in the car, nor are you solely the “you” now being chased by the man who was texting in the car. And we can laugh at what it would be like if you identified very strongly with being the car, or the man, since in truth you are the dreamer. And yet, the dreamer is also the dream. This is deeper down the rabbit hole, down at the level of the ninth and tenth ox herding pictures. This is way out of the territory of what I can express in a few words in a blog, or that could be entirely understood simply from hearing another person’s explanation. It can only be understood directly, experientially, or not at all.

So, lets look at the primary element to discover. What is the true “you”: Who am I?…